Newly released opinion surveys revealed that only 38 percent of Americans felt that the government operated primarily for the benefit of the people, with 53 percent believing that it was “run by a few big
interests looking out for themselves” (Crozier et al. 78). Both President
Nixon's historic summit talks with China and the successful conclusion of
the four-year Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), which resulted in the
United States and the USSR signing the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, offered
significant evidence of Nixon's support for international peacekeeping
efforts, as did his sustained commitment to reducing American forces in
Vietnam. On the home front, Nixon also pledged his support for increasing
social security benefits, yet steadily increasing inflation rates only heightened Americans' concerns about economic stability. In the midst of a weakened economy, an increasingly conservative American public grew more
anxious about domestic issues that the social justice movements of the previous decade had failed to resolve—issues such as race relations, drug use,
and urban crime. As Bruce Shulman suggests, the 1960s' integrationist
ideals of a previous generation were yielding to the tenets of diversity and
multiculturalism, with ethnic and racial groups now celebrating differences
in social identity rather than any longer attempting to blend into a national
melting pot of indistinguishable Americanism (68).

The event that precipitated the major crisis in America's confidence in
governmental authority occurred in June, when five men were caught and
arrested after burglarizing the headquarters of the Democratic National
Committee in Washington's Watergate Office Building. Although the aftermath of investigations into the break-ins would soon connect the burglars
to high-ranking governmental officials, disclosures by November were
insufficiently conclusive to inspire the American public to exercise its voting power to change national leadership. The November race between
Nixon and George McGovern resulted in one of the greatest landslide victories in the American presidency (60.7 percent for Nixon; 37.5 percent for

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